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Rilke, Modernism and Poetic Tradition (Cambridge Studies in German)

(Judith Ryan traces Rilke's development from aestheticism ...)

Judith Ryan traces Rilke's development from aestheticism to modernism, paying special attention to the way his work engages with other poetry and the visual arts. Taking a skeptical view of Rilke's own myth of himself as a solitary genius, Ryan shows how deeply his writing is embedded in the culture of its day. Rilke is now the most widely-read and influential German-language poet, and this study is full of surprising discoveries about his innovative and often profoundly moving poems.

The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism

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Is thinking personal? Or should we not rather say, "it ...)

Is thinking personal? Or should we not rather say, "it thinks," just as we say, "it rains"? In the late nineteenth century a number of psychologies emerged that began to divorce consciousness from the notion of a personal self. They asked whether subject and object are truly distinct, whether consciousness is unified or composed of disparate elements, what grounds exist for regarding today's "self" as continuous with yesterday's. If the American pragmatist William James declared himself, on balance, in favor of a "real and verifiable personal identity which we feel," his Austrian counterpart, the empiricist Ernst Mach, propounded the view that "the self is unsalvageable."
The Vanishing Subject is the first comprehensive study of the impact of these pre-Freudian debates on modernist literature. In lucid and engaging prose, Ryan traces a complex set of filiations between writers and thinkers over a sixty-year period and restores a lost element in the genesis and development of modernism. From writers who see the "self" as nothing more or less than a bundle of sensory impressions, Ryan moves to others who hesitate between empiricist and Freudian views of subjectivity and consciousness, and to those who wish to salvage the self from its apparent disintegration. Finally, she looks at a group of writers who abandon not only the dualisms of subject and object, but dualistic thinking altogether.
Literary impressionism, stream-of-consciousness and point-of-view narration, and the question of epiphany in literature acquire a new aspect when seen in the context of the "psychologies without the self." Rilke's development of a position akin to phenomenology, Henry and Alice James's relation to their psychologist brother, Kafka's place in the modernist movements, Joyce's rewriting of Pater, Proust's engagement with contemporary thought, Woolf's presentation of consciousness, and Musil's projection of a utopian counter-reality are problems familiar to readers and critics: The Vanishing Subject radically revises the way we see them.

The Uncompleted Past; Postwar German Novels and the Third Reich

(Has a bookplate from a special collections department and...)

Has a bookplate from a special collections department and a year and ink letter on the corner of the blank endpaper. - A scholarly work once owned by the German Literature scholar Reinhold Grimm and with asociated bookplate.